NATURE 653 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 1912. 
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTELIAN 
SCIENCE. 
Aristotle’s Researches in Natural Science. By 
Drs Te B. Eones. Pp. vii-274. (London: 
West, Newman and Co., 1912.) Price 6s. net. 
HIS is a very interesting book, and we 
commend it heartily to the readers of 
Nature. Even had we at hand, what we have 
not as yet, a series of translations of all Aristotle’s 
works on natural and physical science, it would 
be no easy task for the student to lay hold of the 
great mass of scattered facts therein contained, to 
deal with the many repetitions and the not infre- 
quent contradictions, and to set in order in his 
mind the range of ancient science as represented 
by Aristotle. This is the task that Dr. Lones has 
undertaken, and he has brought to bear upon it 
a great deal of learning and much patience and 
editorial skill. 
After some introductory chapters on Aristotle’s 
general method and on the consecutive order of 
his books, Dr. Lones proceeds to deal with Aris- 
totle’s conception of the Cosmos, and with his 
account of celestial, atmospheric, and terrestrial 
phenomena. This account is based chiefly upon 
the “Meteorology,” a book of very great interest, 
of which we have an old but admirable edition 
from the hands of that learned astronomer Ideler. 
From Dr. Lones’s brief epitome, we may learn 
much of Aristotle’s curious knowledge regarding 
such subjects as the rainbow, and comets, and 
mock suns, and periodic winds, and earthquakes 
and volcanoes, and all the varied-lore of ancient 
physical geography. The somewhat obscure 
treatise commonly called the “Physics” is next 
treated, and here we are introduced to Aristotle’s 
conception of phlogistic, and to the various 
phenomena of heat and sound, of light and colour. 
The rest, and the greater portion, of the book 
deals with the inexhaustible subject of Aristotle’s 
“Natural History.” We begin with a discussion of 
life itself, of that “vital principle,” or vvyy, 
with which philosophers more ancient than 
Aristotle had dealt, and the. varying aspects of 
which in plants, animals, and man Aristotle de- 
scribes with admirable insight and brevity. And so 
through the study of tissues and organs and the 
functions of organs, through the physiology of | 
locomotion and generation and of development, 
the book leads us easily and clearly on to an 
account of Aristotle’s classification of animals, 
and to his descriptions of the structure and habits 
of all manner of invertebrates and vertebrates, or, 
as he called them, creatures lacking or provided 
with blood. 
NO. 2235, VOL. 89| 
| Lones does the same thing now. 
Let us glance for a moment at one chapter only, 
that in which Dr. Lones deals with the fishes of 
Aristotle. Here, beginning with the Selachia or 
cartilaginous fishes, we hear what Aristotle has 
to tell us about skates and sharks of various kinds, 
and how he confused, on account of its carti- 
laginous skeleton, the Batrachos, or fishing-frog, 
with these Selachians, or, as we now call them, 
the Elasmobranch fishes. We find an account of 
the torpedo and its numbing power, of the angel- 
fish with its rough skin and viviparous habit, of 
the sting-ray and its spiny tail, and of the smooth 
dog-fish and the placental nourishment of its 
viviparous young, which Johannes Miller re- 
described in a classical memoir. Passing to the 
bony fishes, we read what Aristotle has to say of 
the Scarus, or parrot-fish, with its great teeth, 
and browsing or so-called ruminating habits; of 
the breeding habits and curious spawn of the 
perch; of the pipe-fish, and how-its eggs are 
carried in the brood-pouch of the male; of the 
hermaphrodite Serranoid fishes ; of the “ Glanis ” or 
Silurus, from which account Gesner conjectured, 
and Agassiz proved, that Aristotle was acquainted 
with a second species of that genus, inhabiting the 
rivers of Greece, and unknown to later naturalists. 
until Agassiz rediscovered it. 
In one point only in this interesting chapter 
does Dr. Lones seem to me to have fallen into 
error, and the point interests me the more because 
I fell into the same error myself. Aristotle men- 
tions a certain nest-building fish under the name 
of Phycis—the only sea-fish, “so they say,” that 
makes a nest and rears its young therein. Blindly 
following Cuvier and Olivi and other writers, I 
identified this fish as one of the gobies, when I 
was writing my translation of Aristotle’s “ Natural 
History.” My book was scarcely out when, in 
a learned paper on the fishes of Ovid, a German 
scholar adopted the same identification, and Dr. 
But we are all of 
us wrong, as that most learned ichthyologist, Dr. 
>) 
Theodore Gill, soon pointed out to me. The nest- 
‘building fishes which Aristotle speaks of are 
undoubtedly wrasses. The breeding habits of 
some of these are still unknown to naturalists, 
though they may perhaps be well known to Medi- 
terranean fishermen; but in some cases, as in the 
little Ctenilabrus, the nest, as described by M. 
Gerbe, is now familiarly known, and its whole 
story tallies with Aristotle's description. One day 
last summer, on the pier at Yarmouth in the Isle 
of Wight, I met a fisherman who had just caught 
some of these little wrasses to use for bait, and 
I found that the whole story of their nesting 
habits was familiar to him. 
The identification of Phycis, by the way, is 
DD 
